ORIGIN AND DEVELOPMENT OF THE FAMILY TENDENCIES--HATE ASPECTS
The descriptive portion of our task is now completed. We have traced, with such degree of detail as the scope of this book has permitted, the growth within the individual mind of some of the more important of those feelings and tendencies which owe their origin and development to the relations of the individual to the other members of his family. We have seen how these feelings and tendencies are of fundamental importance in the formation of individual character and how they have also exercised a vast influence on social life and social institutions. We have seen also that, throughout their multitudinous transformations and ramifications, the tendencies originally connected with the family preserve some likeness to their primitive character, being ultimately reducible upon analysis to a series of displacements of a very few original trends and impulses. These original impulses fall naturally into two main groups:--those which bind the individual to the family (or to one or more of its members) through a relationship of love, esteem or dependence; and those which are based on a relationship of hate or fear; the trends falling within each of these groups being manifested either in a direct and positive, or in a reactionary and negative form; the latter being assumed as the result of a conflict between one of the trends in question and some other trend of an opposite, or at any rate a different, character (very often one of the family trends belonging to the opposite group).
[Sidenote: The theoretical treatment of our subject and its difficulties]
Since these groups of impulses have shown themselves to play a part of such importance in human mind and human conduct, it is not unnatural that, having completed our review of their manifestations, we should feel some curiosity as to the manner in which they have come to play this part in the course of the past history of the human race and as to the nature of the influence which they have exerted on this history. Unfortunately in the present state of our knowledge it would not seem possible to gratify this curiosity except in a very partial, unsatisfactory and uncertain manner. The psychological mechanisms with which we have been dealing have themselves, for the most part, been too recently discovered to have as yet been adequately correlated, or brought into connection, with the relevant facts of anthropological, ethnographical or biological science. The data from these latter sources are moreover, in spite of much diligent research in recent years, still in many important respects too incomplete to afford a satisfactory basis for such correlation. As a consequence of these conditions, it is to be feared that any attempt that we may make to exhibit the psychical tendencies with which we have been concerned, in their bearings upon early human history, or to explain their origin in the light of this history or of the general conditions of human life and mind, will result in little more than a restatement of our psychological principles from a slightly different point of view. Nevertheless the attempt may be worth making. A summary of some of the main implications of our psychological knowledge in this field may perhaps not seem amiss--especially in view of the astonishing and unlooked-for character of much of this knowledge--and if we succeed in establishing a few connections between our psychological data and the related facts of anthropology or biology, these may perhaps serve as starting points--to be either proved or else corrected--for subsequent enquiries based on a more sound foundation. The reader will understand therefore that, in so far as in the present and the two succeeding chapters there is anything that is not--explicitly or implicitly--contained in what we have already said, we shall have left the region of comparative certainty afforded by the results of observation and induction, and shall be travelling for the most part on the unsure ground of speculation--speculation that can be justified only on the plea of natural curiosity, and by the hope of opening up a few vistas which may be more fully surveyed by better equipped workers in the future.